Top 7 Free Graphic Designing Software for Professional and Creative Designers

Linux has no dearth of graphic design software. Linux has matured into an excellent platform for artists, photographers, animators, and designers. There is a lot of open source software available to create, modify and convert 2D and 3D computer graphics. The applications also offer the powerful features to act as a perfect companion for a digital artist.

Today, we are going to discuss the best free high-quality Linux graphics designing tools.

So, let’s start-

GIMP

GIMP is one of the best free tools for a digital artist to have installed on Ubuntu or any other Linux distributions and it stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It's available in versions for Linux, Windows, and Mac. GIMP's interface differs somewhat from Photoshop, but it mimics Adobe's look and feels which making it a little bit easier to migrate over if you're ditching Photoshop. It has lots of features to provide more than just editing a photo or redesigning it. It can be used as an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter. It is designed to be augmented with plugins and extensions.

Blender

If you're serious about 3D but struggling to afford software, then you're lucky, because the Blender is a free and open source 3D content creation suite which available for all major operating systems. Ton Roosendaal is the founder of Blender. It used to be developed commercially but is now released under the GPL. You can pretty much do anything 3D related with this software including such as modeling, animation, rendering, texturing, skinning, rigging, weighting, non-linear editing, scripting, compositing, post-production and much more.

Krita

Yet another impressive Linux tool for digital artists. Krita was meant as an add-on with KOffice to facilitate image editing within the suite of office tools. But it turned out to have a lot more potential to be an independent desktop application competing with programs like GIMP. Krita is a free and open source painting tool that's been in development since 1999. It comes with a full set of brushes suitable for all manner of work. From its advanced filters can painting assistants for perspective work. The Krita features bring the brush stabilisers to smooth out any shaky lines, a wrap-around mode for creating seamless textures and patterns. And its pop-up palette for quick colour-picking. Krita supports the following image formats, both for importing and exporting: PNG, TIFF, JPEG, Dicom, XCF, PSD, GIF, BMP, XPM, Targa, RGB, and OpenEXR. Additionally, Krita can import ICO files.

DocHipo

DocHipo is an online graphic design software business professionals, and creative graphic designers use to create beautiful visual content for various purposes. It offers thousands of free templates for flyers, brochures, social media posts, web banners, advertisement graphics, and more across multiple industries and occasions. It lets you access and use millions of high-quality stock photos, hundreds of free fonts, and appealing graphic elements such as illustrations, icons, animations, stickers, and so on from its rich design assets library. The text effects and various customization options for all the visual elements give you the creative freedom to bring your design ideas to life. Apart from these, DocHipo’s integration with thirdparty applications such as Mailchimp, Typeform, Jotform, and more adds to your convenience. You can download your designs as JPG or PNG without any watermark. DocHipo’s uncluttered interface and intuitive drag-and-drop editor make the whole design process smooth, easy, and enjoyable.

Gravit Designer

Gravit Designer is a full-featured vector design app suitable for all manner of jobs, from screen and icon designs through to presentations, illustration and animation. This free graphic design software has a wealth of tools for creating detailed and beautiful vector imagery, including non-destructive booleans, a knife tool, and path graphs, plus multiple fills and blending modes, and a powerful text engine. It'll export the files as PDF, SVG or bitmap.

Inkscape

It is an open source vector graphics editor. You can have it installed on your Linux system as an alternative to Adobe Illustrator. Inkscape focuses on the SVG format as its primary file format. This editor has a very good SVG integration which supports many of the more advanced features that aren't always available in other apps – such as alpha blending, cloned objects, and markers. It makes possible to achieve extremely sophisticated artwork. You can export to SVG format, SVGZ, LaTeX, and POV-Ray file format as well. There are extensions which let you save files as PDFs, EPS, and so on.

Crello

This online graphic design tool is your #1 choice to create impressive visual designs for personal and professional needs in minutes. Even if you don't have any skills as a designer, you can craft original and beautiful assets for social media, print, or web in Crello's user-friendly drag-and-drop editor. All you need to do is sign up for free, choose a trendy template from Crello's massive library of static and animated designs, and customize it whatever you want. Once your project is ready, you can download it in a preferable format. The tool is mobile-friendly, supports multi-user accounts, and offers some extra features for subscribers to their Pro plan. But even with a free account in the pocket, you'll get most features Crello provides for comfortable work in graphic design.

Desygner

Desygner has the most simplest UI, even if you are a Non Designer it has tutorials for you to look at, it has a drag and drop option, it has many features that you can choose from, using Desygner you can also design contents like Logos, Social Media Covers, Social Media Images, Banners Invitations, Cards, and also be used for marketing materials that you can use online, it also has access to millions of Royalty Free Stock Images, it has example templates that a user can use for free. It is available on Linux, Windows, Mac OS, Android.

Vectr

As the name suggests, Vectr is a tool for vector graphics. It is slightly different than the regular desktop software. Its Available both as a browser-based web app and as a stand-alone desktop app. Vectr is a free editor for creating 2D vector graphics. It has the real-time collaboration feature. You can provide the URL of your design and others can watch you editing an image in real time. It also has a set of documentation for new users to get started with creating vector design. The desktop app is available for Linux, Windows, and MacOS. But it's not an open source software, still, you can download it for free.

Conclusion

Finally, you came to know about 6 of the best Linux tools for digital artists. Of course, the list we compiled contained only the popular and loved choices for almost everyone using Linux. Apart from that, did we miss any of your favorite Linux tools tailored for digital artists? Also, if you are a digital artist, which one of the above would be willing to choose as the best for your use?